This month blog post I would like to introduce a free performance analyzing tool solarwinds SQL Plan Warnings that provides instant visibility into SQL Server query plan warnings. This awesome tool doesn't require you to install anything into your database server or sql instance, it is just an executable that you can run it in a client host which able to access the sql instance. Here comes a demo of how to use it.
- Download the tool into your client host and unzip it.
- Run the extracted SQL-Plan-Warnings.exe
- Click Connect to instance
- Choose the database type, e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, click Next.
- Enter the sql server instance, port number, and authentication information, click Connect.
- Click the settings icon on the upper right corner.
- Modify the filter settings per your workload characteristics, then press Save.
- Let your database server to execute some workload, e.g.
- If some of the queries had plan warnings that match the filtering settings you set before, it will be shown by the SQL Plan Warnings tool, you can press refresh to get the latest result.
- You can further investigate the execution plan by mouse-over the result and click show plan.
There are many free tools for SQL Server on the internet, as a database administrator we need to test them thoroughly and then use them on even our production database without hesitation, in order to make our work more efficient.
